| Abstract: |
Introduction: The early to mid-second millennium of our era has been viewed as a time of rapid cultural transition and change in indigenous sociopolitical systems in the Philippines in association with developing trade relations with the Asian mainland. The beginnings of intensive long-distance trade with the highly developed state of China and with Southeast Asian state-level polities as early as the Sung Period (A.D. 950-1279) is well attested in the massive quantities of imported porcelains and other mainland trade commodities that have been recovered from numerous large lowland burial and/or habitation sites on many of the major islands of the Philippines (Beyer 1947
Burton 1977
Fernandez and Rogel 1968
Fox 1959
Fox and Legaspi 1977
Hutterer 1973a
Janse 1944
Legaspi 1974
Locsin and Locsin 1967
Spoehr 1973
Tenazas 1968). Although none of these immediately prehispanic sites has been extensively excavated, the limited archaeological data suggest that a number of them represent extensive coastal settlements, with evidence for specialized craft production areas and wealth differentials in burials, indicating the presence of organizationally complex and perhaps socially stratified communities. This interpretation of the archaeological data accords well with Spanish documentation for the immediately postcontact period, which describes European encounters with hereditary "chiefs," regionally influential political leaders standing at the apex of a developed social hierarchy and associated with administrative and commercial centers functioning as important nodes in networks of internal and external trade. Pointing to the seeming absence of comparable archaeological evidence for developing complexity in the preceding prehistoric periods and the apparent temporal correspondence between the appearance of Asiatic porcelains and the growth of nucleated coastal communities, many scholars have viewed these sociopolitical transformations as sudden and dramatic. They see the changes as being causally linked to Chinese attempts to ex-pand and intensify trade interactions with the Philippines and other areas of island Southeast Asia, beginning around the tenth century of our era (Beyer and de Veyra 1947
Fox 1967
Fox and Legaspi 1977
Hutterer 1973b, 1974, but see 1977
Jocano 1975
Tenazas 1977). By focusing on these "external" influences as catalysts to the development of complex society in the Philippines, archaeological and ethnohistorical analyses have been essentially restricted to documenting Philippine trade patterns in the centuries after A.D. 1000, and the sociopolitical matrix in which they operated, in terms of Chinese initiatives, rather than in relation to sociopolitical developments in each of the participating societies that both created a demand for foreign prestige goods and provided the necessary organizational matrix for administering and controlling large-scale systems of exchange. A number of archaeological studies of geographically extensive, high volume systems of primarily "prestige good" trade carried out elsewhere in the world (e.g., Flannery 1968
Frankenstein and Rowlands 1978
Renfrew 1982
Wheatley 1975) have shown that such exchange systems generally emerge in the context of already developed sociopolitical complexity in which foreign sumptuary goods are incorporated into an already existing material symbolic system for "elite" status validation. As noted by Binford (1969: 163), an increased demand for exotic goods and the geographic expansion of long-distance "prestige good" trade systems generally occur "in the context of institutionalized changes through which new statuses appear." Maintaining these increasingly differentiated forms of social stratification demands the creation of new symbolic frameworks for expression and new channels for obtaining potent material status symbols. In the present paper, ethnohistoric and archaeological evidence are combined in an attempt to demonstrate that the numerous complex nons tate societies or "chiefdoms" described by the Spanish as dotting the Philippine coastline at the time of European contact, rather than representing a late-developing and largely externally derivative phenomenon, instead have a relatively lengthy history of indigenous development. The initiation of foreign trade contacts with the Chinese and developed mainland Asian polities beginning around the tenth century, it is argued, represented the expansion of already well-developed internal networks of "prestige goods" exchange embedded in a sociopolitical matrix of developed social stratification and regionally integrated political systems. These external trade systems were in turn linked with intra-regional systems of exchange and resource mobilization, involving specialized production and upland/lowland exchange of both staple and "luxury good" resources between complex lowland agriculturalist groups, interior swidden-cultivating tribal groups, and upland hunter-gatherer bands-exchange systems that were to some degree centrally administered by regionally powerful chiefs based at strategically located coastal ports. Very little ethnohistoric work on prehistoric lowland political systems and social organization has been carried out in the Philippines that would allow us to compare the structure of Philippine "chiefdoms" with that of other nonstate complex societies elsewhere in the world. For this reason, the first half of this paper is devoted to developing such a model of late first-millennium to early second-millennium Philippine societies, combining Spanish and Chinese historical documentation with ethnographic sources and archaeological evidence. This discussion of chiefly political authority and the structure of lowland political systems provides the basis for more detailed consideration of the central role of "chiefly" political leaders in coordinating and controlling basic subsistence and craft production activities, mobilizing regional resources, and administering intra-regional, intermediate-distance (i. e., inter-island) and long-distance trade as various components of a centrally integrated economic system for amassing the resources to finance the political activities of a sociopolitical elite. In the second half of the paper, archaeological settlement data from a region of the Philippines where one such coastal-centered "chiefdom" is presumed to have existed at the time of European contact-the Bais Region of Negros Oriental-is analyzed in the context of this ethnohistorically derived model of regional exchange systems. Specifically, archaeological evidence for the spatial organization of settlement and for the regional distribution of both "prestige goods" and centrally produced household wares is used to examine changes in the regional organization of exchange for the period spanning the mid-first millennium to the time of Spanish contact. Analysis of the archaeological data from the Bais Region is used to suggest the presence of regionally integrated coastal-focused polities with centrally administered internal exchange networks in the Philippines before A.D. 1000. Based on the organizational similarity of pre-Chinese trade and later settlement and exchange patterns in the region, it is argued that, contrary to the traditional view, the initiation of foreign trade contacts did not result in the profound societal restructuring expected to mark the initial transition from noncomplex to complex societies. Instead, it is suggested, expansion of trade interactions beyond the bounds of adjacent coastal chiefdoms may have provided one of a number of mechanisms for further growth and differentiation of these political systems, resulting in the emergence of several larger scale inter-regionally powerful political entities observed by the Spanish at the time of European contact.
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